Canonical and Mark Shuttleworth proudly announced a few minutes ago that the upcoming Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) operating system will have support for gestures, with multi-touch. This is possible via Ubuntu's uTouch 1.0 gesture and multi-touch stack.
Now that the new Ubuntu installer has been released, it is time for another breathtaking feature to take the spotlight. Both developers and end-users will benefit from an end-to-end touch-screen framework in the upcoming Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) operating system.
With Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) various GTK applications will receive gesture-based scrolling support. Moreover, Evince, Ubuntu's document viewer, will be enhanced by Canonical to support richer interactions.
Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition will also feature a gesture-enabled Unity interface. Therefore, users with multi-touch pads or touch screens will get superior window management at their fingertips!
"You’ll need 4-finger touch or better to get the most out of it, and we’re currently targeting the Dell XT2 as a development environment so the lucky folks with that machine will get the best results today."
"By release, we expect you’ll be able to use it with a range of devices from major manufacturers, and with addons like Apple’s Magic Trackpad." - said Mark Shuttleworth on his personal blog.
For the new multi-touch technology, Canonical worked closely with the X.Org and Linux kernel communities, in order to add support for missing features or improve exiting drivers.
"It would be awesome to have touch-aware versions of all the major apps – browser, email, file management, chat, photo management and media playback – for 11.04, but that depends on you!" - said Mark Shuttleworth.
If you want to get involved, then you should know that Canonical's Multitouch code is published on Launchpad and it's released under the LGPLv3 and GPLv3 licenses.
Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) will be released in October 10th, 2010. It will be the 13th release of Ubuntu.
Don't forget to check our website regularly for more news about the upcoming features of Ubuntu 10.10.
